Risks and Scalability of New Technologies

We are developing methods to assess the risks of existing and new technologies in terms of cost and other performance metrics, and how these risks might change in interesting and important ways with the scale of adoption.

Many evaluations of technologies focus on their long-term potential for improvements due to innovation, but the short term riskiness of technologies is also important for evaluating their viability. Short term risks can arise, for example, from changes in efficiency and cost. Moreover, the overall riskiness of technologies can change with production scale. Here we analyze data and develop models to assess technologies based on their riskiness.

Biofuels supply risks: Biofuels have been evaluated based on their greenhouse gas emissions, costs, and potential scale of production. Here we argue that the supply risks, a major energy security indicator, should be considered in addition to these previously proposed metrics for evaluating the performance and scalability potential of transportation biofuels. Biofuels rely on agricultural production as their key input, which is subject to various risks. A risky feedstock supply in conjunction with a highly inelastic demand for transportation fuels can cause substantial price fluctuations, profit volatility, and quantitative shortages which imply negative consequences for biofuels firms, consumers, and the economy. The goal of this research project is to build theoretical models and use data to study the costs of biofuels risks as well as risk-mitigation potentials of various strategies.

We decompose biofuels feedstock supply risks into agriculture supply shocks (due to random events) and competing demand shocks (a function of demand for food crops which is partially unpredictable) and show that the historical yields of major crops used in the biofuels industry show a significant level of volatility. We relate the resilience of the biofuels supply chain to scale and technological specifications and then discuss the merits and limitations of various strategies for reducing the supply risks of biofuels. Our framework is applied to the case of biofuels; however, it provides general insights and analytical frameworks to analyze the performance and scalability potential of other emerging technologies.

Evaluating the scalability of PV input materials: Photovoltaics (PV) is an energy technology that is promising in its climate change mitigation potential. In order to sustain rapid growth in PV manufacturing, it is important to produce a sufficient quantity of input materials in a cost-effective and timely manner. In this project we evaluate the material requirements of large-scale PV deployment and the supply risks associated with these materials.

In the first part of this project, we ask whether metals production can be scaled up at a pace that matches the rapidly increasing PV deployment levels put forward in aggressive low-carbon energy scenarios. We present a new perspective on the metal requirements of PV deployment by estimating the growth rates required for the annual production of PV metals to satisfy the projected PV deployment levels in 2030. We also compare the required growth rates to the historical growth of a large set of metals in order to assess how realistic the projections are.